The vanishing facts

By S. Ambirajan

HARDLY ANYONE in India denies that the vast Indian administrative system is a disaster - corrupt, opaque, ponderous and grossly inefficient. Numerous are the explanations proffered from Paul Appleby in the 1950s to World Bank whiz-kids of the present who have all made weighty pronouncements about the necessity of good governance, and made suggestions to improve the way we manage our public affairs. But few seem to focus on the most important foundation of good governance. No one will disagree that we need politicians and bureaucrats who are knowledgeable, moral, responsible, committed, impartial, honest and transparent. But to pin the blame entirely for our bad administration on the political class and the bureaucracy alone, notwithstanding their substantial contribution to that sad state of affairs, is not the answer.

Politicians and bureaucrats involve themselves in the governance of the country by taking decisions to be implemented by others lower down the hierarchy. This is a continuous and daily process. Not all decisions are the same, and they differ widely in their scope and implications. Simply put, there are three kinds of decisions: (a) routine decisions which are no more than an intelligent application of rules and guidelines determined by policy already framed, (b) tactical decisions that are neither routine nor involving policy, and (c) policy decisions that will set the tone of how future decisions will be taken. The higher one is in the hierarchy, the greater is his responsibility for forming policy.

Appropriate decisions of any kind cannot be made in the absence of adequate information, and the most festering malaise afflicting Indian administration is the non-availability of ``ready-to-use reliable information''. In an atomistic system where administration is totally decentralised with all responsibility in the hands of self-governing villages as was the case in ancient and medieval times, information required was available with the village leaders. If written records were few, they were amply compensated by collective memory. However with increasing economic and political integration, and the emergence of centralised administration, informal methods of storing information were found inadequate, and more formal systems came to be established. It was during the British rule, when those in charge of ruling the country were not organically connected to their subjects, that it became necessary to gather information systematically and document everything on paper so that successive administrators could understand the issues clearly. So was born the system of files, ``notings'' and the much-maligned ``red-tape'' which, in fact, made the governance of this complex subcontinental nation possible. Every decision was taken on the basis of information in the ``notings'' of the appropriate file supplemented by the decision-maker's perception of the problem which was duly recorded for future reference. Thus the ``notes'' became comprehensive and self-contained with full information about past practice and precedents.

The decision-maker's understanding is improved if he is able to command other kinds of information about problems requiring solution. These are either in the form of statistical data, or informed accounts of issues, events and controversies. These are gathered through regular collection of data (e.g. the ten-year Census of population), periodical reports of various organs of the Government where statistical and other information is put to together, specially conducted surveys and commissions of enquiry to probe particular issues. All this information has to be classified and stored properly. The files in the record rooms and other information in libraries are to be kept in good repair and ready for speedy retrieval as and when the information is needed for decision-making.

It is this information structure established during the British rule in every public decision-making organ from the office of the tahsildar at the lowest rung to the office of the Viceroy at the top of the decision- making hierarchy that has collapsed almost to the point of no return.

The key instruments of administration, i.e. files are either not carefully constructed or not made available when required. Both careless noting of information and deliberate suppression of facts are all too frequent now. Once a senior functionary in a department told me how he was chided by his senior - one of the great titans of Indian administration of yesteryears - for preparing a note setting out the pros and cons of a particular policy: ``All that you need are a few minutes in my office to sort it out. Why do you put all of them on paper?'' With telephones, electronic communication and air travel, policies at the highest level are finalised without adequate documentation to help their successors to comprehend the reasons and circumstances that led to the course of action taken. Then there is the difficulty posed by the non-availability of files when they are urgently required for decision-making. It is a common sight in the record rooms of various Government offices to see hundreds of files piled up haphazardly with inadequate labelling and broken down classification arrangements. Periodic rearrangement of files is seldom undertaken, and many are the reasons given - ranging from lack of adequate staff, to disgruntled workers, to deliberate creation of chaos to demand bribes for locating the files. A secretary of a Central Government department claimed that in a court case he had to plead the non- availability of a particular file. The Judge told him in no uncertain terms that it was indeed available, and that he should produce it. This officer shut his office for three days and let loose dozens of clerks who were eventually able to find that precious needle from the humongous haystack. How was the Judge so certain of its existence? The other party in the case told him that he had seen the file with little effort!

This anarchic and disorganised information system has serious consequences for both the individual citizen and the economy. The citizen has numerous occasions to face the bureaucracy. It could be as simple as securing the Pan number from the Income Tax department or as complex as finalising the tax return. If his application for the Pan number and his Income Tax return containing all the TDS certificates and other assorted documentation vanish in the cavernous caves of the department's record room, it may be years and much anxiety before matters are settled. Similar is the situation when a Government intrumentality having lost or misplaced files throws the burden of proving on the hapless citizen regarding his obligations such as payment of water tax and so on. There is thus an easily avoidable cost incurred both by the individual and the economy due to the sheer negligence of those in charge of maintaining the filing system.

Worse still is the consequence of the absence of reliable information for the policy maker whose decisions will have very long term consequences. Unawareness of what happened in the past is sure to prevent him from visualising the future. Thus ignorance of what went before and uncertainty about what lies ahead cannot be a recipe for sound policies. Under such conditions policy makers usually take decisions on the basis of hunches and imperfect knowledge piously hoping that nothing will go wrong. Complications arising from ignorance are multiplied many times when our negotiators confront their fully informed counterparts from other nations in international treaty meetings where the future fate of the nation is decided. The devastation of the public information system has another unfortunate fallout. With no reliable internal record, future chroniclers of today's events will grope in the dark unable to give a reasonable representation of what actually happened.

The moral is clear. Our administration can improve immeasurably if only our bureaucracy from top to bottom decides to keep its information system in good shape. This can easily be done without any interference from our venal political class.

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